1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to bullets, and more particularly, to bullets, which have deployable blades or other portions thereof to increase the footprint of the bullet and/or decrease the momentum of the bullet.
2. Prior Art
The first less-than-lethal bullets appeared in the 1880s when Singapore police shot sawed-off broom handles at rioters. By the 1960s, riot control police in Singapore, Malaysia, and Hong Kong were using more sophisticated wooden bullets. British colonists brought the idea back home to England, where they replaced the wood—which could shatter and possibly penetrate—with rubber. By the 1980s the British had switched to more accurate plastic bullets, solid polyvinyl chloride cylinders about 4 inches long and 1½ inches wide. The bullets are supposed to be shot at the lower half of the body. In the late 1980s, the Israeli military developed its own rubber bullets designed to disperse crowds, to injure but not kill. These small rubber-coated metal pellets are supposed to be shot from a distance of about 130 feet and aimed at people's legs. Rubber bullets were introduced in the United States to quell anti-war and civil rights demonstrators in the 1960s. Though famously deployed against recent protesters, they are most often used by individual police officers to subdue armed and mentally ill people. Rubber type bullets are also used in delicate environments, such as on aircraft, where a regular bullet may compromise the pressurized environment inside the aircraft cabin. The most common kinds are the bean-bag bullet, a cloth pouch with about 40 grams of lead shot that delivers the equivalent of a punch from a heavyweight boxer, and a plastic cylinder like that used in Northern Ireland.
Personal security for law enforcement officers using non-lethal force has been carried over into the public sector. As a result several new tools, in addition to rubber bullets, have been developed. These include stun guns and batons, air tasers, and pepper spray.
Stun guns and batons are devices that use high voltage to paralyze the target. This is accomplished by touching the device to the target. Air tasers are a variation on this by firing two small probes up to a range of 15 feet to deliver the paralyzing voltage. While pepper spray, as the name implies, uses a highly concentrated spray of pepper, up to 3 feet, to be fired into the targets eyes to temporarily blind the target.
There are significant flaws in the designs of all these types of personal security tools. Modern day rubber bullets still kill to often and are only effective if they target and impact a person's torso or leg area. If they impact a person's head, they can do considerable damage and even cause death, which is not generally the intent in situations that call for the use of rubber bullets. The stun guns and batons must be used at point blank range and are useless unless full contact is made. Common clothing, such as leather jackets, can provide adequate shielding. Air tasers are limited to 15 feet and can only be fired once. As with the stun gun/baton version both probes must penetrate the skin of the target to be effective. Pepper spray is limited to 3 feet and must be sprayed into the target's eyes or will back wash into the shooter eyes.